Youth Today’s October
cover story and its chief source, Advocates For Youth (AFY), credited the
10-fold difference between U.S. and Dutch teen birth rates to Holland’s better
sex education, contraceptive services, and acceptance of teenage sexuality.
Like America’s larger policy debate, AFY and the story omitted the only factor
that matters--the huge differences in child poverty between the two nations.

The internationally-calculated
poverty rate among Dutch youth is about 5%,one-third that of U.S. youth (17%). The Netherlands’ annual teen birth
rate is 5 per 1,000 girls ages 15-19 and near-zero among younger teens.

AFY and sex-ed backers don’t
need to junket Europe to find low teen pregnancy levels. In suburban Marin
County, California, for example, only 5% of white teens live in poverty. Their
birth rate also is 5 per 1,000 girls ages 15-19, and near-zero among younger
teens. Meanwhile, in agricultural Tulare County, California, where 18% of white
teens are impoverished, the white-teen birth rate is 50 per 1,000--10 times
that of white Marin teens. Forty percent of Tulare’s Hispanic girls are poor;
their birth rate tops 100, like Guatemala’s.

Where
U.S. youth enjoy low, European poverty rates, they display low, European birth
rates; conversely, Third-World poverty yields Third World fertility. ETR
Associates’ detailed 2000 study of California communities found teen birth
rates so powerfully tied to prior youth poverty rates that it’s hard to imagine
what could be more important. Yet, when not ignoring poverty issues altogether,
America’s teen-sex lobbies pretend wealthier girls get pregnant just as often
but abort more. Not true. Clinic surveys find poorer teens have abortion and
miscarriage rates several times higher than richer teens.

In any U.S. city, you can create
a formula from the poverty rate and adult birth rate that predicts each race’s,
community’s, and era’s teenage birth rate with astoundingly close precision.
For 80 years, in fact, the teen birth rate has paralleled the adult birth rate
with uncanny precision. Add the inconvenient fact that adult partners 20 and
older collaborate in most “teen” pregnancies, and America’s tiresome squabble
over sex-versus-abstinence education, sex on TV, and teenage morality needs
massive overhaul. Some modest suggestions:

Third, treat adults like teens.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, useless to date, should issue
new “Sex Has Consequences!” posters and public service announcements depicting
Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, Dan Burton, Gary Condit, Laura Schlessinger and
other big-time philanderers slashed-over with epithets like “DIRTY,” “REJECT,”
and “PRICK.” (Why not? The National Campaign thought it was okay to plaster
those words on its recent ads featuring teens.)

Fourth: treat teens like
adults... in every way. That means fully sharing America’s bountiful resources
with young people to reduce disgracefully high youth poverty levels and deficient
health services. Teens have sex like adults, they have sex with adults, and
their choices reflect poverty and lack of opportunity.

Buried in AFY’s report is the
fundamental point:Europeans “view
young people as assets, not as problems. Adults value and respect adolescents
and expect teens to act responsibly. Governments strongly support education and
economic self-sufficiency for youth.” That’s 99% of preventing “teen
pregnancy.” Meanwhile, Americans quarrel over 1%.